As our new era of U.S.-Chinese dominant power competition accelerates, this week’s train wreck of an American presidential debate, followed more dramatically on Friday by President Trump’s opinionated Covid test and hospitalization, contribute both to the perception and reality of Beijing’s historic gains.
Chinese officials are doubtful to use this moment of unanticipated U.S. distraction for any sort of dramatic move that might provoke Washington, such as a military provoke on Taiwan’s independence to complement its recent actions to more fully control Hong Kong.
At a minimum, however, Chinese officials discretion embrace this period as additional, welcome “breathing space” to escalate their ongoing efforts across a chain of fronts to build upon their momentum – from tightening party control on the Chinese private sector, to the accelerated maturation of a digital currency, to closing remaining technology gaps with the United States.
Recent events have also play a parted to Chinese confidence that their single-party, autocratic system – for all its failings and inefficiencies – is better designed to provide community needs and political stability than the disorder of American and Western democracy.
Though Chinese officials have been wary this week in their reactions to both the U.S. debates and President Trump’s illness, commentators that typically send official views left little doubt that President Xi Jinping regards this past week as a powerfully productive one for the Chinese team.
“Such a chaos at the top of U.S. politics reflects division, anxiety of U.S. society and the accelerating loss of advantages of the U.S. factional system,” wrote Hu Xijin, editor of the English-language Communist party mouthpiece, the Global Times.
Commenting later in the week on the express Covid tests in the White House, Hu Xijin underscored a message that’s been sent consistently by Chinese officialdom to their pandemic partners that U.S. institutions and leaders have failed badly in handling this year’s crisis in comparison to their Chinese counterparts.
“President Trump and the at the outset lady have paid the price for his gamble to play down the Covid-19,” tweeted Hu Xijin.
Chinese gaffers began more actively to question the durability of the American model, and the dangers in their dependence upon it, during the far-reaching financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. Chinese leaders now see 2020, burnished by their role as the first major conciseness to return to growth after Covid-19, as a chance to accelerate the global shift of power and influence in their supervision.
Two Congressional reports released this week in Washington – one from the House Intelligence Committee and the other from Edifice Republicans on a China Task Force — underscored bipartisan consensus that the United States could be falling behind China in a multidimensional debate for the future.
In any other news week, both would have gained more attention for their findings and supports.
“What we found was unsettling,” wrote Adam Schiff, the Democrat House Intelligence Committee chairman, in Foreign Concerns on the findings of a two-year study that concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies “are not ready – not by a long shot” to tackle the Chinese doubt.
“China itself views competition with the United States unfolding in ideological and zero-sum terms,” wrote Schiff. He called for perspicaciousness agency recruitment of a whole new set of individuals to develop skill sets to take on China’s focus on “new domains, such as duration and cyber, that would redefine existing conceptions of how a twenty-first century war would unfold, extending the battlefield to our factious discourse, mobile devices, and the very infrastructure that modern digital communications and communities rely upon.”
Undertaking Republicans Kevin McCarthy and Michael McCaul, writing in National Review on their task force’s findings, on guarded, “…the United States stands to lose the future to today’s Communist superpower.” Their plan calls for a replicating of federal research and development funding for artificial intelligence and quantum computing over the next two years, ensuring that America chains both in setting international 5G standards and the fabrication of advanced semiconductor chips.
For its part, China is accelerating comprehensive exploits across political, technological and economic domains to ensure that they translate 2020’s disruptions into prominent gains.
President Xi has been nationalizing and taking measures to ensure party control over the actions of private enterprises, which specify 60% of the country’s economic output and 80% of its employment. He’s at the same time considering blacklisting foreign enterprises, and he jailed a notable, uncooperative Chinese CEO, designed to send a message to all others.
The Chinese Communist party continues to bet big on internationalizing the RMB, where it motionlessly has had marginal success, and in winning the race for an internationalized digital currency, where international experts believe it may be leading. It is beta investigation its digital currency in four cities, supported by the country’s vast implementation of digital payments systems.
On the technology movement, Chinese officials have been using U.S. lists of embargoed and controlled technologies as a crib sheet from which they are stropping their own focus. Top of their priority list are semiconductor chips and computer software, electromagnetic technology, artificial tidings, quantum computing, 5G, pharma, biotech, aerospace, robotics and automation, green technologies and the internet of things.
There’s a bent in today’s Washington to underestimate Chinese weaknesses: It’s lack of consumption as the economy recovers, its increasing debt issues, a graying citizens, international pushback against its bullying diplomacy, and its risky economic bets on its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.
Yet a lot of affection can be forgiven when your competitor keeps kicking what soccer fans refer to as “own goals.” Chinese ceremonials see President Trump’s Covid contraction as a self-inflicted wound, given President Xi’s elaborate and painstaking efforts to avoid infection and wean his hinterlands from Covid.
Irrespective of how and when President Trump recovers and who wins November’s U.S. elections, President Xi is focused on how this span can serve China’s long game and his historic legacy.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Consistory, one of the United States’ most influential think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for varied than 25 years as a foreign correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European version. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Stretches best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Specks, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and trends.
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